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Stan VanDerBeek's ironic compositions were created very much in the spirit of the surreal and dadaist collages on Max Ernst, but with a wild, rough informality more akin to the expressionism of the Beat Generation.

Science Friction consists of animated paintings and collages of photo clippings from various newspapers( most of which is of then-President Eisenhower), combined in a form of organic development. This short is a non-verbal political satire, reflecting society, the mass media and scientific inquiry: “A social satire aimed at the rockets, scientists, and competitive mania of our time.

A short animation featuring a spinning slice of bread by Jeff Scher with music by Shay Lynch. This was made for a gallery show of films and paintings about bread.

As an underground filmmaker, Scher uses lights, abstractions and visual effects all paired with music to create experimental short films. His films have been described as animated still life as they are made from various drawings in which the images change to trigger responses within the human mind. He uses his paintings and collages by overlapping the colors and textures to seem as if they are in fact “moving” in a hypnotic fashion. Images of influential behaviorists, Hermann Rorschach and Ivan Pavlov, appear in some of his films. The films are highly irrational in their juxtapositions, but this is the intention of the filmmaker. Scher wants his viewers to create their own stories from the visuals he provides.

It’s Always the Same Story is a slight but charming teenaged anecdote, directed by Joris Clerté and Anne Morin, in which a Frenchman recalls sneaking off to see the steamy X-rated film Emmanuelle with a friend ... only to have his father take him to see the exact same film the very next day to teach him about “the facts of life.”It made them both change one towards the other.

Oktapodi is a computer-animated short film that originated as a Graduate Student Project from Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image. It was directed by Julien Bocabeille, François-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier, and Emud Mokhberi.

Two octopuses fight for their lives with a stubborn restaurant cook in a comical escape through the streets of a small Greek village.

Lavatory Lovestory is a delightful short film by Konstantin Eduardovich Bronzit. The film is a minimalist short about a lonely middle-aged public toilet attendant who sits in her little booth day after day, collecting coins from the lavatory users while she reads the newspaper and yearns for another man in her life, someone to love and hold her, fantasizing about the romantic lives that other people enjoy.

The story follows her angst and sadness, and her transformation into a happy and joyful human being. The unusual setting of a public toilet turns out to be surprisingly fitting, and make it slightly longer than conventional short films.

Panspermia is the name for the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores. This piece places the viewer in the middle of a virtual world of an aggressively reproducing inter-galactic life form, and depicts a single life cycle of this unusual self propagating system.

Karl Sims used an original software to create and animate forests of 3D plant structures. Artificial evolution techniques were used to interactively select from random mutations of plant shapes until a variety of interesting structures emerged. The subject matter of the piece suggests the underlying biological methods that were used to efficiently create an unusual level of complexity. Dynamic simulations and particle systems were also employed to achieve motions that are calculated automatically.

Dumbland details the daily routines of Ryan, a violent and foul-mouthed three-toothed man with a bulbous head, angry expression, and perpetually open mouth. The man lives in a house along with his hyperkinetic and high-stressed wife and squeaky voiced alien-like child, both of whom are nameless as is the man in the shows.In this episode, Randy develops an interest in a neighbor's shed and proceeds to become verbally abusive towards the neighbor, which, meanwhile, reveals that he is a one-armed duck-fucker.

Dumbland is a series of eight crudely animated shorts written and directed by David Lynch.The style of the series is intentionally crude both in terms of presentation and content, with limited animation. The filmmaker describes it as "a crude, stupid, violent, absurd series."You can download the first two episodes of Dumbland from Atom Films here.More episodes are online at DavidLynch.com. To view them, you need to be a member of the site, or else you can buy Dumbland.

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About

The goal of Mellart is to promote experimental and underground culture in its various visual forms: animation, art, cinema and comics.It's directed by Marco Milone. He is both a chess and a comics journalist (his book Fumetti was one of the finalists of the Franco Fossati Prize), a poet (Geometria del silenzio, Sulle orme della speranza, Nel labirinto del delirio) and a writer (L'eterna condanna ed altri racconti). He was editor of «Inguine mahgazine», «Be Side» and «Solaris», and of the publishing house Cagliostro E-Press. He also plays chess. He's in the national correspondence chess team.His blogs are: Marco Milone, Beautychess.